Progress and Barbarism: The World in the Twentieth Century by Clive Ponting Chatto & Windus 584pp, £30 in UK
As the end of the millennium approaches, histories of the 20th century proliferate. The fascinating thing is to see how the various authors solve the problems of melding chronological, thematic and regional approaches without leaving glaring gaps in the narrative or neglecting key dimensions. Martin Gilbert's history (published last year) was little more than a chronological dictionary of dates; Mark Mazower's recent Dark Continent was faulted in some quarters for the "primacy of politics" approach, making the struggle between democracy and fascism the central issue of the century; while even Eric Hobsbawm's masterpiece The Short Twentieth Century was accused of fighting old battles and making capitalism versus communism the overarching theme. One measure of the quality of Clive Ponting's contribution in this end-of-century historiography is that he successfully negotiates all these pitfalls.
Ponting lays out his thematic stall with rigorous logic. After a scene-setting chapter presenting the world as at the year 1900, he gives us the broad picture on population, methods of production, environmental threats and the globalisation of economies before turning to politics proper - nationalism, imperialism, democracy, fascism, communism and dictatorships. Finally socialism and revolution - the ideas of those who believe in the perfectibility of man - are balanced by depressing chapters devoted to Man the imperfectible, burdened by Original Sin, and manifesting the lack of perfection via repression, racial discrimination and genocide. The interesting thing about Ponting's book, showing a sophisticated intelligence at work, is that a neo-Marxist approach to structures is balanced by a barely-concealed pessimism about human nature.
His success at solving the problem of structure might suggest that Ponting's volume is abstract, dry or etiolated. But the book is a judicious mixture of narrative and analysis, where theory and actuality are in correct balance. In contrast to Martin Gilbert's history, where facts and figures were spewed out in Gradgindian regularity, Ponting knows exactly when to use statistics tellingly. He is up to date - as his rivals are not - on the appalling casualties sustained by the Soviet Union in the "Great Patriotic War" of 1941-45: no less that fifty million dead (a quarter of the Russian population) in a war that caused eighty million deaths in all. But Ponting's other statistics are just as chilling: twenty million dead in the first World War (including the 'flu pandemic of 1918), 150 million dead in all wars, ten million from natural disasters, 25 million from car crashes and another 100 million citizens killed by their own nation states. To this can be added at least 100 million deaths from famine - an inevitable consequence of the North-South divide, where the United States, with a fifth of the planet's population, consumes 30 per cent of its resources and a domestic cat in the Western world enjoys a better diet than 80 per cent of humans.
Another great merit of Ponting's book is his lack of Eurocentric parochialism. He finds time for matters such as the near-extermination by Germany of the Herreros in south-west Africa in 1904-05 - a subject rarely touched on by historians of the 20th century. And he has noticed the significance of the Mexican revolution of 1910-19, a civil convulsion ranking only behind the Russian revolution of 1917-22 and the Chinese revolution of 1945-49. This seismic convulsion went unmentioned by Mazower and emerged in Gilbert's volume as a tissue of risible confusion, but here it receives thoughtful treatment. My only quibble about his generally sound treatment of Latin America is the lack of any mention of the dreadful Chaco war of 1932-35 between Paraguay and Bolivia. Given Ponting's justifiable interest in the shenanigans of the Standard Oil Company, he might have found in that conflict an interesting example of the "dog that barked in the night".
Although scholarly, the book is informed by savage indignation at man's inhumanity to man and a genuine feeling for the underdog. It is not surprising, then, that Ponting's treatment of Ireland is also clear-eyed and insightful. He rightly sees that the key event this century was the Curragh Mutiny of 1914 by significant sections of the British Army; this was the source from which so much of subsequent evil was to flow. Perhaps someone who was marked down for victimhood by the British establishment is in a unique position to read the mind of "perfidious Albion".